1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Dukes, Leopold

by Israel Abrahams

DUKES, LEOPOLD (1810–1891), Hungarian critic of Jewish literature. He spent about twenty years in England, and from his researches in the Bodleian library and the British Museum (which contain two of the most valuable Hebrew libraries in the world) Dukes was able to complete the work of Zunz (q.v.). The most popular work of Dukes was his Rabbinische Blumenlese (1844), in which he collected the rabbinic proverbs and illustrated them from the gnomic literatures of other peoples. Dukes made many contributions to philology, but his best work was connected with the medieval Hebrew poetry, especially Ibn Gabirol.  (I. A.)